CHAPARRAL

Pathway to Parity

PARITY: defined by Webster’s online as “the quality or state of being equal or equivalent.”

For adjunct faculty, the issue of parity is an ongoing struggle. At GCC, we call our long-term process “Pathway to Parity.”  If you have ever looked at the adjunct salary schedules at the end of our contract agreement, you will have noticed that Appendix B-1 has a “parity allocation.” Many newer part-time faculty may not know what this additional percentage (around 9 percent of the base hourly rate found in Appendix B-2) represents. In 2000, after immense statewide pressures brought by part-time faculty and their allies, the state legislature added three line items to the California community college budget:  the office hour line item, the medical benefits line item and the parity pay line item. Each of these line items in the budget were set as fixed amounts and were meant to provide some relief to part-timers who were not getting paid salary or benefits equivalent to what full-time faculty were receiving.

     The parity line item was meant to compensate adjunct faculty for the preparation, grading and assessment work that they were doing outside their paid teaching hours. Full-time faculties have a required “load” which designates the number of in-class teaching hours they must provide per week. Additionally they are also paid for the extra time that they must spend preparing class lectures, marking papers or grading assignments. A faculty member’s “load factor,” or in-class teaching hours, is determined by how much of this outside preparation and assessment work is required in that particular discipline.

     In most credit subjects where full-time faculty are required to teach 15 hours, they are paid for one hour of preparation and grading for each hour taught. This is the crux of the pay inequity that part-time faculty suffer. While we are paid for our in-class teaching time, at what some would consider a reasonable rate, when one factors in all the hours spent on preparation and grading the overall compensation is poor. For those in subject areas where there is even more assessment and grading necessary, such as English composition, full-time faculty are paid for more hours of marking and are therefore required to do fewer in-class teaching hours. Unfortunately, the adjuncts in those areas are not compensated at all for the time spent grading papers and because of the “60 Percent Law” cannot even teach as many in-class hours as part-time faculty in other disciplines.

     On the other hand, full-time faculty in other departments such as Physical Education or non-credit ESL are deemed by the district to be relatively free from grading written work and so they are expected to put in more in-class teaching time. These full-timers are somewhat compensated for preparation but not for marking. The light marking load of part-timers in those divisions, in effect, makes their overall teaching pay higher.

     The way these inequities of teaching hours versus preparation/marking time are being dealt with around the state is by simply putting part-timers on the same pay schedule as full-timers and slowly letting their pay percentage rise to a proportionate (pro-rata) level equal to the amount of preparation/grading and teaching that is inherent in the pay of a full-timer.

     In our district we have tried to increase the pay of part-time faculty by occasionally giving this group across-the-board raises that were a few percentage points higher than raises for full-timers. However, the pro-rata progress hasn’t been consistent or necessarily fair, especially to those part-time teachers who do a lot of marking or assessment in their courses.

     Pathway to Parity is an endeavor that will take many years to achieve. It will not immediately give a boost to all part-time faculty vis-à-vis full-time compensation, but it will start making a difference to some of the more disadvantaged adjunct faculty. No group, full-time or part-time, is going to lose out on future raises. However, as we begin to see better budgets, we can attempt to right the wrongs in our pay system by choosing different small salary areas to repair (as we have consistently been doing within the full-time schedule). We can begin to compensate adjuncts for the extra work that their course load area requires of them, we can pay part-timers who have attained higher educational goals (just as we do for full-timers) and we can give those adjunct faculty who have served the institution over the years the kind of pay raises that increase from year to year rather than stopping completely after ten years.

     In districts where pro-rata pay programs have put part-time faculty on full-timer salary schedules, both groups have made significant salary gains. By our figures, Glendale College is currently paying part-time faculty 62 percent of the proportional pay of full-time faculty (for comparison please see the attached data from around the state). Hopefully Pathway to Parity will be able to help slowly decrease this 38 percent discrepancy in salaries while increasing a full-time salary schedule that benefits all.

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